Yes, we are all getting older and grumble more than we used to but the quality of digital radio here in the UK seems worse to my ears than FM.
Why is this?
There is a huge campaign to promote digital radio and there is talk about analogue radio being switched off in just a few years. Have we started to go backwards?
Now, when I visit Germany I can hear very good sounding digital radio, not perfect but it sounds miles (or should I say kilometres?) nicer. Have we got people in charge who either don’t care or can’t hear?
Answers on a comments box please.
Oh, happy New Year.
3 Responses to “Why does the digital radio sound worse? (In the UK)”
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Hi Tosca, Happy new year.
In the UK, FM and AM radio are not about to be switched off at the same time as analogue TV. Only about 90% of the country can receive digital radio at the moment, and as an island with many remote parts to it – especially up here in Scotland with the small islands and the mountains – too much of the population still relies on analogue radio. Also, only 10 million DAB units have ever been sold in the UK, compared with an FM radio in every car, on loads of MP3 players, three or four in every house, and my sister even got one in a Christmas cracker.
I don’t own a DAB radio and I haven’t been to Germany, so I don’t know about the comparison between the sound qualities, but I know that stations like BBC 1xtra and 6 Music suffer from the same heavy-handed audio compression artefacts as Radio 1 does.
I suspect that the problem also has to do with bandwidth, and the need for stations to lower their bit rate. London, for example, has 51 different digital radio broadcasts, according to this highly in-depth research I am doing on Wikipedia. Germany, meanwhile, has only granted DAB licenses to 8 broadcasters nationwide. I can’t put figures on it (at least, Wikipedia can’t), but I’d say that would mean that digital audio broadcasters in Germany have a far higher bandwidth and can therefore broadcast at a far higher bit rate than their UK counterparts.
We live in a age were everything may be a 100 miles wide but is only half an inch deep. The only intent is to raise maximum revenue by having as many stations of minimal quality as possible in the narrowest bandwidth possible. The government also sells radio bandwidth by auction so there is a tax effectively on the natural phenomenon of electromagnetic radiation.
I think you will find that the audio quality or program content is of little interest to the directors running the radio stations as long as revenue flows in and costs are minimised. That is the nature of the modern world. Even the BBC is obsessed with ratings and heavily into the greed culture hiring extremely expensive management and celebrities leaving little scope for diverse broadcasting.